In the year before Mitchell started--in June 1835--John Batman had steered a boat up the river Yarra and exclaimed, 'This will be the place for a village' when he contemplated the site of Melbourne. The village had actually been founded, and men were living in it, unknown to and unauthorised by the authorities in Sydney, at the very time when, to the westward of them, Mitchell, travel-worn but still elated, was leading his expedition back across the verdant valleys of his Eden.